Movies Pick: Greeks Baring All

“Dogtooth,” the first feature by the Greek director Giorgos Lanthimos, is on the Academy’s shortlist for Best Foreign Film nominations. It’s a coldly comic fable about a wealthy businessman (Christos Stergioglou) who, with the complicity of his wife (Michele Valley), has kept their children, now adults, locked in the family compound, depriving them of schooling and contact with the outer world—except for visits from his company’s security guard (Anna Kalaitzidou), to provide their son sexual release. Anthony Lane wrote, “What could have seemed arch and contrived becomes, in Lanthimos’s careful hands, something more mysterious: a fable without a moral, seething with political suggestion but offering precious little to the allegorist viewer. The terror is all the more persuasive for being filmed in peaceful sunshine; Buñuel would have approved.”

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